Hey guys - I thought I’d share this video. I’m doing rotary engraving on snare drum shells. I added a stepper to my wood lathe. It still needs some tweaking, but I am making progress. Thanks for this great community!
VERY NICE!
I do a lot of wood turning and have thought about this idea. If your willing to share I would be interested in:
- How you mechanically integrated steppers on each a axis.
- What laser at what power?
Peter - no, I am not. I am just using an arduino with a generic printer port CNC controller, and using X,Y axis. I am also still on LW3. I have installed LW4 and tried it a bit, but I haven’t gotten comfortable with it yet. Also, the terminal portion doesn’t seem to work on the Mac version. I can’t make changes to my GRBL config.
Don, I am planning to do a whole write up. I originally added the stepper to the lathe to get custom indexing for things like open segment bowls. I am using a KaleCNC 10W laser. This is cheap 2x4 pine and it doesn’t burn great. I hope to test on some hard maple soon.
@Justin_Ahrens I was impressed with how well it was burning 
Can you share pictures of the drive so I can start dreaming?
Is that a vicmark lathe?
Don, I’m at work, but I’ll take some when I get home. It is a Nova 2024 lathe.
@Justin_Ahrens awesome thanks.
Curious about the 808 nm laser . As I understood the blue light 445 nm lasers are more efficient? Is that incorrect? In your opinion which is better?
Scott, I am not informed enough to provide a good opinion. I bought this laser off of eBay. It is the only laser I have used.
Don, here is a photo of how I attached the stepper to my spindle. First I used 20 and 36 tooth pulleys. This made the math easy, since the ratio is 1.8, but I found that on the 14" diameter shell, I wasn’t getting enough resolution, so no I have a 10 tooth on the Nema 23 and a 48 tooth on the spindle.
Don, Here is the Y axis. I originally tried to use a pen ala the Eggbot, which is why it is pretty light duty with a nema 17. That didn’t work well, so I modified it for the laser.
@Justin_Ahrens thanks a ton for sharing this. I was thinking of something similar so maybe its a candidate for a project.
Oh heck yeah. Love it.